1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a code division multiple access transmitter comprising a modulation stage followed by an up-converter, and to a code division multiple access receiver comprising reciprocally a down converter followed by a demodulation stage. This invention may have important applications in relation with the future mobile communications standards which will use code-division multiple access modulation techniques for all types of channel.
2. Description of Related Art
Spread spectrum transmission techniques, implemented for over thirty years in the field of military communications, may also be of interest for use in mobile radio applications. According to the basic principle of these techniques, a signal is spread over a frequency bandwidth that is much wider than the minimum bandwidth required to transmit the signal. More precisely, the idea behind spread spectrum is to transform a signal with a given bandwidth into a noise-like signal of much larger bandwidth: hence the total power transmitted when a spread spectrum technique is used (this power is assumed to be the same as that in the original signal) is spread over 10 to 1000 times the original bandwidth, while its power spectral density is correspondingly reduced by the same amount. This feature gives to a spread spectrum signal the characteristic of causing little interference to a narrow-band user.
This frequency-spreading characteristic offers a transmitted signal the possibility of using CDMA (code-division multiple access), particularly in order to support simultaneous digital communication among a large community of relatively uncoordinated users. The CDMA multiplexing technique is described for instance in the document "Overview of multicarrier CDMA", by S. Hara and R. Prasad, IEEE Communications Magazine, December 1997, pp. 126-133. In fact, a CDMA system is a spread spectrum system in which, in order to share the same bandwidth, the users are assigned different spreading codes (generated by a pseudo-noise generator and determined by code parameters such as a chip length T and a code length N) in order to spread their signals over a bandwidth much wider than their transmitted data bandwidth, a specific signature sequence being assigned to each user to ensure signal separability.